


With Quiet Hands

by melwil



Category: Spooks | MI-5
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-11
Updated: 2011-04-11
Packaged: 2017-10-17 22:39:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/182042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melwil/pseuds/melwil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tom and Danny sit and look. Spoilers to 3.2</p>
            </blockquote>





	With Quiet Hands

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted in 2007

They sit and look.

It’s too late, past the appropriate frame of time, and they both know it. They both understand it. They both accept it.

And yet . . . they sit and look.

Not at each other, of course. They look at their hands, at the ceiling, at the knots in the floor. They look at the walls, and out the windows, and at a spot somewhere over each others’ shoulders.

They can hear the hands of the clock moving.

Danny doesn’t quite understand why he came. There was reasoning behind it, of course, somewhere down the line. But somewhere along the way the meaning was lost and now he was sitting in a strange room looking at his hands.

With Tom sitting opposite him.

Danny knew how this would end. They would make awkward small talk, awkward overtures. They would remind each other of old adventures, the kind of adventures that twisted your insides out. They would walk away at the end of the night, wishing it had been more. Wishing they had poked their toes into the water.

Except . . .

This time it was different. This time he found himself looking at his watch, tracking the hands as they moved around. This time he was waiting for the end, waiting for the end to the small talk, an end to the games they always played.

Tom wasn’t the man he remembered anymore. In fact, if you looked at it objectively, he was barely a man at all. His personality, the qualities that made him Tom, had been stripped away, removed, put into cold storage.

Danny couldn’t quite pin point the moment that it happened, the point in time when Tom’s transformation was complete. But this was a different man sitting in front of him.

And still they sit and look.

And the hands of the clock keep moving.


End file.
